Julian Opie has a profound importance for the character’s handling and is inspired by the character’s handling – how he distilled the universality and personality of his theme into a basic outline, forming several lines Graphic lines. His numbers seem to be freed from the instruction manual and evolved into the uniqueness of the people who inspired them.
Today Opie is known for his universally beloved walking figure, enjoyed worldwide for public places and private spaces, but his journey to this iconic style is long-term, a careful observation of human behavior . Observers caught up with the artist to study the origins of the phenomenon’s vocabulary more deeply, in line with his solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery, who was in New York for the first time in five years.
According to Opie, his early work was often centered on everyday objects, home environment and architecture, all combined through stories. “I’m using images of objects, books, chairs, newspapers, paintings, things around me, manuals, and things in my pocket. They are things I can draw and play with with ease. So they become like a language. “It seems like he is detecting the realm of human action without directly interacting with the characters themselves – in fact, that was Opie’s criticism of Opie during his first major museum performance at the Hayward Gallery in London. “They worked hard with me. In those days, I was very young and had a museum show, so there were a lot of negativity,” he said. “One of the main criticisms is that there are humans on the show, and I think it’s a very strange criticism, but it makes me think.”
Opie starts searching for possible universal characters, just like a simple toy car that can represent a vehicle, representing real characters. “I started looking for graphic images of people who could adapt to my language and use.” Ironically, he found them in Egyptian hieroglyphs and classic male and female bathroom logos. “Although people are far from what people really do, these images are like universal images. I need a shared existing language.” OPIE started to overlay images of his closest friends to these bathroom symbols using computers superior. “They didn’t stand the signs statically, so I started bent them. It allowed me to attract humans and bring personality.”
Opie stood in the newly installed show, explaining how the Lisson Gallery exhibition expanded on the people he had long observed people walking on the streets. He noted that throughout art history, artists have struggled to convey movements among human figures—walking, hunting, dancing or any motion that gives life fantasy—to capture the feeling of energy that makes us feel alive with a sense of naturalism. “I’ve been looking for people who have been walking out of the streets for a long time. I’ve also dealt with people because it’s a different kind of human sport. I’ve dealt with people who run, and they’re all in public with ordinary people like me. Cars and athletes run. “Opie has perfected this unique universal but no doubt his own “form language, image, form language of man” over the past four decades, a style from this careful Research and observation of contemporary life emerged.
In particular, his walking profile has become his most well-known work in public places, perfect for attracting more audiences who would otherwise be immersed in daily life without necessarily tending to stop and think about art. But many people instinctively reflect the rhythm of these characters as they move through the flow of the city, which is from this idea Busan Walkers The 2023 series emerged – a green walking profile rendered in highlight automatic paint on aluminum, mounted on huge concrete blocks. By studying the ideas of people walking along the beachfront people in Busan, South Korea, Red phone. (2023) and Yellow phone. (2023) depicts the numbers in motion absorbed in their mobile devices, which have become an integral extension of the human body, and exist in both the physical world and virtual space.
However, while Opie has long portrayed adult figures in his walking crowd, the exhibition marks the first time he focuses on children, who are center stage in huge murals and wall-mounted digital animations.
For the performance’s wall work, he interacts directly with children of different ages and grades, capturing their natural movements, postures and walking rhythms. Although their numbers are eventually reduced to several graphic lines and bold flat colors, the unique proportions of their limbs and the speed and rhythm of the steps are still illustrated. In the video animation, these elements still convey their personality, revealing how much our identities are expressed through body gestures in the world.
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The multi-panel mural is almost rubbery like a comic, but is actually hand-painted on stone, a detail that becomes evident upon closer inspection, evoking the huge smell of temples and ancient sculptures. Even more interestingly, as a person moves, the works begin to dissolve into abstraction: the thick black lines that define numbers start to dominate, consume the corpse they outline and break it down into a visual composition of fragments, only to observe from a distance merged only when.
“Ultimately, we are all characters, symbols and numbers living in a very abstract world. Once we eliminate the emotional and psychological aspects, we read about reality.” Opie reflects. “We live in a very abstract world where everything is decoded through numbers and data.”
His independent character created a similar tension. Their thick profiles are mounted on thick cast concrete foundations and exist between images and objects. But when viewing directly, they can only fall into the graphic outline, even if the carefully designed structure makes them tolerable, visual information distils it into its most important form. Even the numbers in the LED animation of OPIE are only arranged as pixels, flashing life in precise coordination, and their colors are determined by the specific data set. These encoding instructions determine their existence, causing them to appear, move and exist again.
Although OPIE’s practice is carefully planned and strategically designed and closely relies on external technologies, which not only allows his numbers to exist in the world of quantity and data, but also from it, he still has a huge impact on direct observations. The emphasis on human behavior and its initial translation into drawings. From the school videos he recorded, he created at least 40 drawings, superimposing them onto the originals to perfect and develop the final animation. It is worth noting that his characters never leave the framework. Their rhythm, fainting movement is still contained in it, indicating eternal vitality, which may be repeated forever. “They come in and out of time… there is no beginning and end point. It’s an endless program.” He explained, emphasizing that these numbers are not the product of fixed files, but an algorithm that keeps constantly by reprocessing the original data Reshape yourself. “To me, that looks more real.”
It can be said that Opie’s art is not only about representation, but also about capturing repetitive patterns of human behavior, the way people act and react to their surroundings. He searched for a basic order, an essential numerical structure that can only be expressed through distillation abstraction, which is in the direction of universality.
This pursuit of universal human experience (the symbol immediately identified) is exactly what makes Opie’s art very suitable for public and outdoor commissions, where the work must interact with people who do not necessarily tend to consider art. “I always think of art as a public act of communication,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a personal thing I do in the room and then do another thing for me. It’s the beginning to do the work, but it shows that it’s end.”
When Opie’s art enters the real world and meets the audience, its full potential as a universal language can be realized. His numbers become a symbol of how people of all ages and backgrounds can see themselves, connect with them, and respond intuitively, just like the way we unconsciously absorb road signs, build markers or statistical charts, These approaches attempt to distil personality into a broad collective pattern.
“Julian Opie” is on display at the Lisson Gallery in New York until April 19, 2025.
